SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden

by Chuck Pfarrer

  Osama bin Laden was not born to be a monster. He was raised in an affluent and moderately religious Saudi family. He was a soft-spoken, retiring, impressionable boy who lost his father at a tender age. Like thousands of other Muslims who became extremists, Osama bin Laden came under the influence of men who were ruthless, brutal, and amoral. The only difference between Osama and a teenage body-bomber in Palestine is that Osama bin Laden had money—lots of it. And because he had money, Osama was sought out by men with extremist views. Hate requires capital to manifest itself in violence. Osama was flattered, he was cajoled, he was praised. He was told he was a sheik, a religious visionary, and a man whose deeds on earth would earn him a seat in paradise. He listened. He believed. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood, and came over to their belief that violence was necessary to set the world right.

  It was all in the Koran, they said, and they could find it and point to it. Osama believed them, as did thousands of others. He bought in.

  Suicide bombers are invariably sold the same bill of goods: seventy virgins will attend them in cool gardens and they may be joined by seventy more members of their family. It is almost impossible for a Westerner to grasp that these words would be adequate to convince a grown man to throw away his life—to blow himself to pieces—and worse, to take the lives of as many other human beings as he possibly could.

  One intelligence analyst called Osama bin Laden “the Madonna of jihad,” meaning that he had a little talent and a lot of money. Osama never received any formal military training. He didn’t know how to wire a bomb, disassemble a rifle, or hijack an airplane. He was not a religious scholar and he possessed few skills either as a tactician or a strategist. What he had in abundance was cash.

  Osama used his money, and he learned to use people as well, convincing others to embark on one-way missions to strike down godless infidels in great heaps. Like all terrorist leaders, Osama lacked personal courage. He never considered actually hijacking an airliner himself—that was for someone else. Mere shaheeds could do that. He was a sheik, a leader; it was for others to die. Osama would provide the means by which his dedicated followers could realize their own dreams of martyrdom. Osama was like a travel agent, selling one-way all-inclusive trips to Paradise.

  Money is almost always power. Cash can buy weapons, rent muscle, and buy ideas from intelligent people. Osama was raised by a family that made its living by doing all of the above. Hiring immigrant labor and paying the salaries of Western-trained architects and civil engineers, the Bin Ladens transformed Saudi Arabia from a swath of desert to a country filled with palaces, superhighways, airports, and state-of-the-art petroleum facilities.

  It was natural that a son of Mohammed bin Laden would think it possible to remake society. His father changed the face of a nation. Osama set his sights not on one country, or a region, but on the world. Mohammed bin Laden changed Saudi Arabia by working in concrete and steel; his son would try to remake the world in blood.

  Osama might be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that the United States was a paper tiger. He had no idea of the vastness of the United States, nor could he conceive of its military and technological reach.

  Until 1983, Osama bin Laden had no worldview. His education had consisted of three years of business college. Few of his classes interested him much, and the hard science he needed for a degree in engineering had proved to be beyond his scholastic ability. Osama never in his life had to work at anything—cars, houses, hunting trips, business jets, women—these things came to him because he was a millionaire’s son. As an upper-class Saudi, Osama might also have felt that hard work, even academic work, was somewhat demeaning. He’d come from a family of high achievers and he withdrew from Abdul Aziz University before his academic failure became too spectacular. He’d lived a sheltered life, surrounded by servants. As a child of privilege he was unused to either effort or contradiction. When he pronounced an opinion, people agreed.

  Osama bin Laden followed the progress of the Iranian Revolution intently; he believed, as many extremist Muslims did, that what the Iranians were seeking to create was the rule of God on earth. The face of the Iranian Revolution would eventually be revealed in starker terms, but at its inception the Ayatollah and his gang of mullahs and imams were greeted by the Iranian people with ecstasy.

  Close upon the success of the Iranian Revolution came a reminder that the faith of Islam was not secure. On December 26, 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. And it was there, in Afghanistan, that Osama bin Laden would begin his career as a leader of Jihad.

  * * *

  The heroic struggle of the Afghan people to throw off the Russian invaders was not at first a particularly religious endeavor. Despite myths of his own making, Osama bin Laden did not immediately travel to Afghanistan to join the Jihad. No one did. It would take several years for the struggle of the Afghan people to take on the religious character with which it is seen now. The first leaders of the Afghan resistance were not particularly devout men. They did not ask the Muslim world for assistance—only for weapons.

  Though some Afghani warriors invoked the name of God and declared Jihad against the occupying Russians, most Afghan citizens saw their struggle in more down-to-earth terms—they had been invaded by the Russians and now did what they had always done when they found a would-be conqueror at their door: they waged total, bloody, and unmerciful war.

  Like the Americans before them in Vietnam, the Russians would be defeated by an enemy that did not seek major engagements, had no standing armies and few fixed bases. They were up against ghost soldiers who struck their enemy at times and places of their own choosing and melted away whenever the Soviets tried to concentrate their forces.

  Afghanistan has been aptly called the graveyard of empires. In twenty-five hundred years of recorded history, Afghanistan has never fielded a unified coherent army, yet it has defeated in turn the Macedonians under Alexander, the Mongols, the Huns, the British at the height of their imperial power, and the combined might of the entire Soviet military.

  In 1973, King Mohammed Zahir Shah was overthrown. Earlier, in 1963, his introduction of a parliament, civil rights, free elections, and the vote for women were taken in stride, but the king was neither charismatic nor popular. A decade passed.

  In quick succession, the Afghan government was headed by an ever more brutal series of Soviet puppets. In 1979, to stabilize their unruly protégés, the Soviets invaded, and the first Jihad of modern times began.

  Thirteen thousand Russian soldiers were killed in the Soviet-Afghan war, and another fifty thousand were maimed or wounded. Afghan civilian casualties were incalculable, but probably number close to three million. More than five million Afghani civilians were made homeless and fled into Pakistan and Iran. During nine years of Soviet occupation, Muslims from all over the world came into Afghanistan to fight. Some were little more than adventure tourists, coming for a week, learning to shoot weapons at Jihad training camps, and coming home to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, or Yemen to strut about in their new Pashto trousers. But others were serious and bloody-minded men. And a smaller portion of them were religious zealots.

  It was the Afghan people themselves who defeated the Soviets. They were helped by U.S.-provided weapons that were funneled through the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI. Fewer than ten thousand “Afghan Arabs” joined the Afghanis.

  For almost a decade the Soviet Union provided a battle laboratory where Jihadists from all over the world learned how to fight. They gained combat experience and training in explosives, clandestine military work, small-unit tactics, and the simple business of killing efficiently. The Soviet-Afghan war had several world-altering consequences: The first was that the Soviet juggernaut would shudder and creak and wheeze back across the border, broken and defeated. Soon after its defeat in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union would collapse. No one in NATO or the West could predict this outcome when the Soviets landed on the day after Christmas at the Kabul airport in 1979.

 
No one in the West could foresee that because of the Soviet defeat, a new class of warrior would emerge into history. The West had armed, trained, and encouraged Jihad fighters against the Soviets—it would now find itself fighting these same men. It was blowback on a global scale. Skilled in the use of state-of-the-art weapons, computer literate, technologically adroit, and media savvy, these new war fighters did not fight for a nation, or a region, or even necessarily for a religion. Sunni and Shia both were warriors of an Idea.

  That idea was to remake the planet: one world, one people under Islamic domination and the will of God. To accomplish this, these new Jihadists would use any means, however bloody, nefarious, or cruel. Women and children were fair game, as were the enemy’s ships, trains, and airplanes. These men would do the work of God. The time had come to make way for the coming of the Mahdi, the prophet of God. They would fight to bring about the end times as predicted in the Koran.

  Riding out of the dusty plains of Afghanistan, galloping past the wreckage of Soviet tanks and the bleaching bones of Russian soldiers, Jihad had come.

  HERO OF THE LION’S DEN

  AROUND 1982, OSAMA DECIDED THAT he would become a polygamist like his father. Osama purchased a small, four-unit apartment building about a mile from his mother’s home and decided to fill it with three new families. His objective, he told his friends, was to show that polygamy was a thoroughly Islamic way of life, and, as practiced by the Prophet, could be a fair and equitable arrangement for all involved.

  Osama’s choice for second wife was surprising. She was seven years his senior, the daughter of a wealthy Jeddah family who had earned a Ph.D. in child psychology from the women’s college of Abdul Aziz University. Soon he courted and married another highly educated woman—wife number three. She also held a doctorate, this one in Arabic grammar. Osama’s third wife was known as Umm Khalid. She moved into unit number three, and raised a son and three daughters. Osama’s fourth wife was from Mecca, a daughter of the prominent Gialani family. After celebrating their nuptials, she, too, moved into the apartment building and there bore him three children, eventually giving birth to a son and assuming the title Umm Ali.

  Osama had taken a job with the family business. His duties at the Bin Laden Group’s headquarters in Jeddah did not take up very much of his time, and Osama found himself playing host to a series of visiting fund-raisers, fresh from the war in Afghanistan.

  Some were rough, military men who had little time for the gangling, soft-spoken Bin Laden. Others were polite, accepted his hospitality, and enthralled him with tales of battles with the Russians. They needed money to buy weapons and found that the young millionaire was willing to write checks. Just as important, he made introductions to the upper echelons of Saudi society.

  Later, in his own mythmaking, Bin Laden would claim to have traveled to Afghanistan the day after the Soviet invasion. This is nonsense. During the early 1980s, he spent his days raising a gaggle of children, seeing that they were home-schooled, and playing host at the hospitality tents offered by his family’s company at religious events such as the Haj. It was not until after the success of the Beirut bombings that Osama bin Laden decided to get involved in the “holy war” then evolving in Afghanistan.

  Despite Beirut, or perhaps because of it, the United States was now pouring money into the Afghan war. The major route for U.S. funds and weapons was through the Pakistani ISI (Inter Service Intelligence). Pakistan became the clearinghouse for American cash, and that made the ISI the powerbroker among the Afghan-manned groups who did the actual fighting of the Soviet invaders.

  The Saudis were anxious to open their own direct channels to the Mujahideen. Osama told several stories about his path to Jihadi stardom, but things probably didn’t begin to click until he reconnected with Ahmed Badeeb, his old teacher. After leaving the faculty of Al Faqr University, Badeeb started to work for Saudi intelligence, eventually becoming an aide to Prince Al Tarqi. Osama met his teacher at one of the Bin Laden Group’s sponsored events. They exchanged pleasantries and the older man sized up his former student. Osama was wealthy, he was connected, and he was eager. Thus began Osama’s cultivation by Saudi intelligence. Prince Al Tarqi saw Bin Laden as a conduit and cutout for funding Afghan Jihad.

  Wealthy people like to surround themselves with others who are either beautiful or interesting—this is the case in New York and Paris, and it is also the case in Mecca and Jeddah. Osama was introduced to thirty-four-year-old Sheik Abdullah Azzam, then the most dashing of Arab Afghans fighting the Soviets. Osama came under the sway of this highly educated, articulate, and fearless Mujahideen. Lawrence Wright pointed out that the romantic image of the warrior priest is as strong in Islam as it is in the Japanese culture of Shinto. Abdullah Azzam was the quintessential Arab manifestation of this spiritual, resolute, and determined warrior.

  Azzam was a religious scholar with a degree in sharia law. Born in Palestine, Azzam found that his fiery sermons got him kicked out of both his native land and Jordan and Egypt before he landed in Saudi Arabia. He eventually drifted to Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. Azzam was a tall, handsome man, and had a beard streaked with gray. He was an articulate, even mesmerizing speaker, and he wore the black and white checked Palestinian kaffiyeh that marked him as both a combatant and a man determined to fight for freedom.

  Azzam’s message was simple: Islam would come to its rightful place when Muslims no longer played the victim. The caliphate had been won by force of arms, and Islam’s first caliph, the Prophet Muhammad, was a prophet of the Lord and was a military leader. It was the duty of all Muslims to resist infidel invaders when they intruded on Muslim lands. Tape cassettes of Azzam’s sermons included his motto, “Jihad and the rifle alone. No negotiations, no conferences, no dialogue.”

  Azzam was a Jihad rock star.

  Osama frequently provided hospitality when Azzam visited Saudi Arabia. Osama and his friends would listen as the sheik amazed them with stories of battling Soviet tanks. Azzam maintained that the participation in Jihad was not an option for able-bodied Muslims—it was an obligation. It was their duty to fight the Soviets. Azzam was there to raise money, but also to recruit men. Osama was enthralled.

  Preachers like Azzam convinced many Saudis that communism was a threat to their region, and a menace to their religion. Should the Soviets be allowed to remain in Afghanistan, Pakistan would surely fall, then Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. It turns out that there are not just geopolitical dominoes, but religious dominoes as well.

  During this time, Osama was being tested by Saudi intelligence. His recruitment followed a time-honored pattern. He was first asked to do small favors, then perform slightly more involved tasks. When he had successfully fulfilled that request, he was given slightly more responsibility and eventually larger tasks, such as providing cover jobs for radicals recruited from abroad. The Cairo offices of the Bin Laden Group was soon funneling Algerians, Libyans, Moroccans, and Yemenis into Saudi Arabia, and then facilitated their transportation into Afghanistan.

  Osama was himself a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it’s likely that at this time he made contact with Egyptians who were part of the mother organization in Egypt. Prince Turki al-Fisal noted Osama as a man who might do some good.

  Osama bin Laden, the mediocre son of a Saudi millionaire, had finally found his métier. His star was on the rise.

  Both the United States and Saudi Arabia believed that the Russians’ aim was to conquer Afghanistan and destabilize the countries in the Persian Gulf region. There was oil in the region but the Russians had plenty of their own. What was really in question was the Strait of Hormuz—the opening of the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean. Through this narrow body of water, almost 40 percent of the West’s petroleum passes by tanker. The Russians wanted the Strait of Hormuz, and the West needed it. That is what raised the stakes of the Soviet-Afghan war.

  These were geopolitical considerations and in 1984 they were way above Osama’s pay grade. The prime mo
ver and shaker in Saudi Arabia’s Afghan affairs was Prince Turki al-Fisal. A month after the Soviet invasion, the prince flew to Pakistan to coordinate aid to the Mujahideen. Prince Turki would become the pivot man in a secret alliance between Saudi Arabia and the United States to vector weapons and money to aid the Afghan resistance.

  This alliance would eventually defeat the Soviet Union, but spawn the hell child of international Jihad.

  Prince Turki and the Saudis had to tread carefully. If the extent of the Saudi and American aid did not remain secret, the Soviets might easily use it as an excuse to invade Pakistan itself, bringing the bear one step closer. For these reasons the Pakistanis insisted that all money and weapons, both Saudi and American, be transferred through the ISI.

  Almost five years after the Soviets first invaded, Osama bin Laden made a trip to the battle area. Incredible as it seems, he had not gone earlier because he could not secure his mother’s permission. Armed with the arguments of Abdul Azzam and his personal assurances that her boy would be well taken care of, Osama traveled on one of the family jets to Islamabad.

  On June 26, 1984, accompanied by Azzam, Osama slipped across the Afghan frontier at a place called Jaji. He found a squalid camp surrounded by shallow, hastily dug trenches. Morale was high, but the fighters’ weapons, clothing, and equipment were in pathetic condition. Yet these men were happy and eager to fight. There was a major Soviet encampment quite close by. Osama found himself on the front lines.

  He would later recall a shame he felt for not participating earlier in the struggle against the Soviets. “I asked forgiveness from God Almighty, feeling that I had sinned because I’d listen to those who advised me not to go.… I felt that this four-year delay could not be pardoned unless I became a martyr.”